


The Playground Kiss

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M, Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-29
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-19 20:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He kisses her on the cheek.  Olivia's in her early thirties before she parses the meaning<em></em></em>
</p><p> </p><p> Warning: Set around 6B and Subject 13.  There's references to child abuse within the story - canon-based and nothing more explicit than what the show itself as shown regarding Olivia - but you may wish to be careful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Playground Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Dress shirts, alcohol, glasses….*blinks* Somehow it morphed into this, sorry, but I love that scene in 6B

He’ll kiss the side of her cheek, soft and unbearably sweet.  The first time it happens, Olivia’s standing in the kitchen of Walter’s house, there’s the scent of alcohol on their breath; she’s still dressed in her work clothes, her dress shirt.  Peter had let her make the first move, the second move, too.  He reels her in with one hand on her lower spine, fingers brushing the curve of her buttocks, bringing their hips together.  He ends it by kissing her cheek.

Odd, but it’s never been in the repertoire of her past lovers.  Something childlike, innocent about the motion, and the unexpectedness of it makes Olivia stutter.  Draw shy.  He smiles faintly, face sidled close and waits to see what she’ll do.

The rest of their night doesn’t pass innocently.  The gentleness Peter exhibits never fades, fixed with every interaction, every full body hug, every Eskimo kiss.  He’ll curl around her at night like a barrier, built of bone, fragile skin, blood.  When Peter’s carefree, and work isn’t an issue, he’ll walk beside Olivia hand in hand, a pendulum swing with each step.

 

XXX

 

The first time Olivia witnesses an act of violence she’s four years old.  She sits on the kitchen tiles, hands tangled in her mommy’s dress, and tries to stop the bleeding.  “It’s alright, darling,” her mother says.  There’s blood slick between her teeth, dribbling down her chin.  Her words sound slurred.  One eye is swelling fast and Olivia’s heart rate is jackrabbiting, not knowing what to do, in a panic because of it. “He didn’t mean it, ” mommy says. “It’s alright, Olive.” Olivia can’t imagine how it could be, she’s never seen this type of violence before.  The feeling of not knowing what to do,  _how to do it,_  terrifies her.  It’s alright; she says the next time, the time after, and the time after that.  It’s alright, until it sounds like a drone of acceptance and not any form of comfort at all.  Olivia learns about butterfly bandages, antiseptic creams.  She learns the acronyms for RICE, DRABC before she learns her multiplication table.  Her bedroom is scattered with dolls that don’t inspire play.  The teacup set Olivia got for Christmas, she gives to Rachel instead.  She seeks solace in drawing, she reads.  Mostly, Olivia pays attention to the mood surrounding her, waiting for tripwires, grenades, for the ground to erupt beneath her feet.

Olivia’s five the first time an act of violence is perpetrated against her.  She’s sitting in the back yard under the Japanese wisteria, the trunk climbing upward over a rickety gondola, the branches and flowers reaching toward the earth in a purple waterfall, and she’s shaking.  It’s seven in the morning.  There’s already a sting of heat in the sun’s rays.  She’s due at day-care by eight am.  There are two doctors who attend, who have been attending day care since Olivia was three; they sit in white lab coats, with broad shoulders, clipboards held close.  Olive doesn’t like them.   Willem, who poked too hard, smiled too brightly, whose games were confusing - and Wally, who didn’t seem to notice the children at all, as if they were beneath his regard or less than human.  Or at least, at one stage he didn’t.  But something’s changed.  Wally’s gone back east, a family emergency, Willem said, and the few days he _does_ show up, Wally scans the children with a desperate intensity. He sees them now, Olive knows, as more than just footnotes in his laboratory.

Of the two doctors, Olive preferred Wally to Willem’s bright regard.  Of the two doctors, it’s Wally who’s changing, arrogance slipping away with each visitation.

But either way, Olive doesn’t want to go to day-care. She’s sick of the yellow medicine – how whenever Wally returns east – the dosage increases in his absence.

The back door slams shut.  “Get your butt out of there, goddammit.  _Now_.”

She shrinks backward, stares at the dusty old combat boots at the edge of the wisteria.  “No,” she says.

“You live under my pay,” he roars.  “I own you.”

He crawls in after her, he breaches the walls of her fortress like a monster, fingers clawed and reaching.  He hauls her out by the ankles, belly riding against the turf.  Her stepfather picks her up by the shoulders.  Eyes blood-shot, breath rank, and shakes Olivia until her teeth rattle.  Until her head feels like it’ll pop off her shoulders.  She bites through her lip, held suspended mid-air, arms crushed to her sides.  He shakes her until she’s crying, and then he drops her like so much rubbish.  “It’s alright,” mommy says.  “Olive dear, it’s alright.”  She smoothes blond hair away, murmurs nursery rhymes until Olive's tears quieten into hiccups.  She fixes all the scrapes on Olivia’s knees from where she was dragged and from where she fell.  “Ssh, baby girl.  It’s over.”

Olivia’s seven the first time she met someone – anyone - who told her it’s  _not_ alright. 

It’s not an adult and it’s not her mother, and it’s not any of the schoolteachers who turn a blind eye to Olivia’s myriad bruises.  It’s a boy.  No older than herself.  He’s scared of the adults around him but for a different reason to Olivia.   He pushes the fear, the innate suspicion he has of them, aside to reason with her.  “You gotta trust someone.”  You gotta tell an adult, he insists, someone in a position to actually do something.  Because it’s not alright, it’s not  _ever allowed to be alright_.

She does tell an adult, and for the first time, Olivia sees someone take  _her_ side, stand up against her stepfather.  He doesn’t hit her that night or her mom, but no less than a week later they move away from Jacksonville and relocate, far, far away from Walter Bishop and his son.  The second time Olivia trusts an adult to do something; she’s already shot her stepfather twice.  She should kill him, but in the end Olivia tells her side of the story, she doesn't cry, her hands don't shake.  She's not a five year old kid this time.  She trusts the authorities to take him away, and Olivia never sees her stepfather again.  She speaks to Detective Lisa McGride, a member of SOCA (sexual offenses and child abuse unit), and adds the acronym to the list of others she’s gathered over the years.

Olivia’s nine, when she decides what career she wants.  Olivia’s twenty-nine when, unknowingly, she hunts down Peter Bishop again.

 

XXX

 

He’s gentle with her, in all the ways that feel alien now. 

John was athletic in bed, this side of rough.  He’d leave marks all over her body, scratches, bites, little brands of ownership, of mine, mine, mine written into her skin.  Peter will explore where he’s invited and hover at the boundaries of Olivia’s do-not-enter signs.  He’ll brush up against her inquisitively.  He doesn’t know how to launch an attack – he never kisses so roughly there’s blood on her lips. Peter’s like water, fluid, slipping between her fingers and out of reach.  It’s in his history – a man without possessions -  and it never occurs to him to try to own her.  He loves Olivia too much to hobble her sense of freedom. 

She’ll work her hips, nuzzle his throat.  She’ll feel the muscles in his back flex, his thighs bunch, and she’ll say, little more than a whisper.  "You can hold on tighter.  They’re the type of bruises I can cope with."

He’ll laugh, he’ll turn them over, he’ll interlace their fingers together and rock.  Friction, sweat, a spiralling sensation of shared pleasure.  Olivia’s in her early thirties before she parses the meaning - the differences between ownership and worship. Gently, he kisses her cheek.

 

 


End file.
